Note on Sarah Palin

It's possible I'm being too harsh on the lady. It's one of those situations where I'm wary of being hypocritically supportive, and perhaps end up being hypercritical instead. I'm trying to be fair-minded, but I may be bending backward a bit too far.

Book Plenitude

Orwell writes a great deal about the lack of access to books--Jack London stories are out of print, the new Penguins offer an unparalleled chance to get cheap classics--how you have to haunt used-bookstores to find a great amount of English literature. I am reminded how lucky I was to grow up not only in modern New York City, with all the Penguins, the paperbacks with most of the classics of world literature available, but also as the child of two professors, hence with access to two university library systems. Now, of course, interlibrary loan, Amazon, and Abebooks make book plenitude even more of a factor.

(Nota bene: A few years ago I ordered a complete collection of Calderon de la Barca's plays over Abebooks; I got an edition published ca. 1850, from a bookstore in Chile. The Spanish are way behind us in getting their classics available for the masses.)

What in my life compares with Orwell's? Getting old comic books and science fiction as I was growing up. I scoured book stands on the streets, and used book stores, to acquire a complete run of Peanuts collections in the 1950s and 1960s--great labor, now rapidly becoming obsolete as Fantagraphics republishes every drawing ever done by Charles Schultz. I got a pretty in-depth knowledge of SF published between 1940 and 1980--if not the encyclopedic knowledge of the true fan--by similar efforts. (Compared with most SF enthusiasts of my acquaintance, I think I had a better knowledge of older SF, though I was much more patchy about recently published works.) So, for these selected genres, I know precisely what Orwell means about the thrill of the serendipitous discovery, the unsuspected author, the lure of the unexpected new book. But for the classics--oh, I am a jaded man, luxuriating in the overprivilege that comes with Library Access.

I think this dynamic will continue in SF for awhile. For example: when I check Barnes and Nobles or Borders bookshelves, very little, if any, of Poul Anderson appears on the shelves. More must be available on Amazon and Abebooks--but I think the young SF enthusiast will discover Anderson by chance in the used book stores, and have the joy of the method of discovery added to his appreciation of the author.

I'm a Classicist, and I Approved This Parody

Is this really a parody, or have they just changed the names to protect the British?

Believe me, alcohol-fueled disrespect for antiquities is something that happens....

Sarah Palin Money

http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20080831/pl_politico/13016

Palin, say conservative activists, has instantly changed how they feel about McCain’s campaign and spurred them to go to work for the Republican ticket.

First, though, they’re expressing their newfound fondness for McCain with their checkbooks. Since tapping Palin, the campaign has raised nearly $7 million online, according to McCain aides.

On Executive Experience

Arethusa noted the importance of executive experience. In my readings, I've come across wonderful discussions on the distinction between the principles of legislative action and of executive action. Legislators make universal rules; executives apply them to particular circumstances--or, see Carl Schmitt, know (as sovereigns) when to make exceptions to the rules. Legislation can be called a science; executive power is pure prudence, where questions of character and experience come directly to the fore. There is a fair theoretical background for saying that experience as a legislator does not provide you the sort of prudential experience you need for action as an executive. This shortchanges the argument that getting a bill enacted in the first place requires a certain amount of prudential moxie*, but still has some argumentative weight.

In other words, not only does Arethusa have a point, but it can be footnoted!

* "Prudential moxie" is a googlewhack.

Experience vs. Judgment

Our modern politics continue to revolve around concepts of rhetoric. Right now: the relationship of experience to judgment. Where does judgment come from if not experience? I quote from an unpublished paragraph of mine:

This loose association of taste with rhetorical thought was greatly strengthened in the Renaissance, when proto-aesthetic thinkers such as Leon Alberti, by means of (possibly inaccurate) readings of classical rhetoricians such as Cicero and Quintilian, began to reconceive of taste as a faculty of judgment. The equation of taste with judgment highlighted taste as a personal quality—a mark of individual character (ethos), and hence of style, now become the external expression of character and taste. But taste, since rhetorical, was more precisely an exercise in imitation (imitatio) and invention (inventio): just as an artist studied the excellencies of previous artists, and used them as a ground from which to produce his own style, so an aesthete studied previous excellencies of taste, and used them as a ground from which to produce his own taste. Such judgment (giudizio), diversely varying with individual temperament, and acting upon the contingent particulars of artistic subject matter, was the analog of discrezione—a key component of prudence—and closely associated with ingegno (wit or genius), the virtuosic exercise of such individual judgment. Ingegno, since rooted in individual judgment rather than in beauty immanent in external reality, was the aesthetic equivalent of Machiavelli’s equally rhetorical, prudentialist notion of virtù.

The short version of which is that Obama is claiming judgment without experience, by dint of character--he is claiming the characteristic of political genius, in the eighteenth-century use of the term. The argument for Palin as having judgment without experience is also one of genius. How long till we return to Kant and judgment rooted in transcendental reason?

Note on Bloomberg

The New York Times says he's considering trying to scupper the term-limits rule, so he can be mayor of NYC a third time. If he does try this, a vaguely sane Democrat--Anthony Wiener?--would probably get my vote.

Notes On Orwell

1. He doesn't mention the Labor Party victory for more than a year after the 1945 election. I suspect he didn't think the Tories would be turfed out of power short of a Class Revolution, and didn't quite know how to deal with a Socialist party actually coming to power and enacting reforms without benefit of a revolution.

2. He addressed the themes of 1984 obsessively for something like a decade before he wrote the novel. An enormous amount of 1984 is a response to the writings of James Burnham, later of National Review fame.

3. For someone so obsessed with clear writing, he makes rather a muddle with "decency." Yes, an instinctive knowledge of proper behavior is worth keeping in mind separate from ideology--but Orwell himself conflates decency with a Socialist political program.

4. He reminds me of the value of knowing not just the classics, but a wide range of second-ranking works. Just as Carl Schmitt tells me about forgotten political philosophers of the nineteenth century, and Gadamer about German aestheticians of the nineteenth century, I find out about obscure English novelists of the nineteenth century from Orwell--George Gissing, say, of whom I had never heard before, and am now tempted to read.

(What do I have to contribute? Comic books, science fiction, and academic history writing, all of a certain generation!)

5. His emphasis on the exploitation of the Third World by the First seems more of the 1990s than the 1940s. How much do the modern theorists of Empire and Globalization remember Orwell as an ideological forebear?

6. His love of traditional English bric-a-brac, including a love of what he explicitly deems ugly, also seems to presage the love of kitsch.

On the Obama Speech

1. I am not the ideal audience. Makes it difficult to judge the skill of the speech. Decent I suppose.

2. Amidst the boilerplate, an awful lot of spending plans. Both Goldberry and her mother noticed this. Goldberry did not much believe we will end dependence on foreign oil in ten years.

3. If 95% of the people will have their taxes reduced, that implies 5% of the people will have their taxes raised a lot. Might it be bad for the economy to have really high taxes on the richest 5%? Is it an impossible stipulation, implying that more people will have their taxes raised? Enquiring minds are curious.

4. Mentioning Republican attacks, potential and actual, was defensive, and allows people who have just tuned in to get an idea of just what those attacks are. Not sure these tactics were brilliant.

5. Mentioning his "unusual pedigree" is yet another reference to his race. Ugh.

6. Saying various reasons to vote Republican are small issues which don't really matter--talking about universal cynicism--recycles his contempt for the American voter.

Wow

I suppose this is as good a time as any to say it: I so underestimated John McCain.

For most of the lead-up to this summer's battle between McCain and Obama, I was fairly convinced that the race would be a repeat of the 1996 battle between Clinton and Dole, with McCain cast (despite his vigor and maverick image) as the colorless Face of Yesterday. Worse, I thought McCain's famous temper would get the better of him on the campaign trail, leading to embarrassing gaffes, once his erstwhile cheerleaders in the press began to turn vicious. I thought McCain would flounder in his new role, stripped of his media support and required to rally the partisans of the right in an uphill battle against the Young Sun God.

But no. It turns out that McCain was not the man I imagined. He is tougher, feistier, more imaginative, a better speaker, and, as today's selection of Sarah Palin proves, both far readier to listen to intelligent advice from his conservative base and to take the risks that will be required to defeat Obama and his ardent supporters among the American elite.

Serious conservatives have long whispered that Palin was the best possible choice, but few expected McCain to take the risk: she is, after all, inexperienced and largely unknown. She could still blow up in the McCain campaign's face. Tapping her could look, as did Mondale's pick of Ferraro in 1984, like a cheap attempt to secure women's votes.

But I suspect McCain was right to swing for the fences. The Obama campaign and its lackeys seem to have been discombobulated by the choice. Obama's people have hilariously attacked Palin as "inexperienced," and some elements of the press have already gotten pretty outrageous in their attempt to question Palin's suitability for the job.

As everyone is already pointing out, the choice of Palin slices through a whole series of Gordian knots: young, female, unimpeachably socially conservative, unimpeachably reform-minded, personally appealing, personally interesting. On the surface, she presents a striking contrast to McCain. On a deeper level -- that of convictions, tastes, temperament and intellect -- she seems to be his perfect match. If the world had been arranged slightly differently, these two could easily have been husband and wife. They may turn out to be the most effective co-campaigners in memory.

And this presidential campaign continues to be the most interesting and dramatic of my lifetime.

Congenital Optimism

Bill Kristol writes

But if you’re pro-life, conservative and/or Republican, you certainly don’t want Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid running the country. If a McCain-Lieberman ticket is the best way to thwart that prospect, you could probably learn to live with it — even perhaps to like it.

And the Iraqis will welcome us with smiles and roses.

La Plus Ca Change

We used to call them sturdy beggars. All that changes is the language--social science jargon nowadays.

Olympics Query

Why did the UK do so well this year? The Brits have long been a byword for underperformance at the Olympics--what happened?

On Gentleness and Decency

"Gentleness" and "Decency" recur in Orwell's praise of England and the English--one almost wonders what cuckoos laid that race of yobs and soccer hooligans we know so well. Americans, of course, are one of his images of power-loving roughs--but I think Orwell would have been happy to note that "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" did strike a note with the American people. (And Orwell had too much Jimmy Cagney in mind when he thought of America; not enough sense of Main Street and Abraham Lincoln.) But where is the truly gentle nation today? Alas, I'm not sure America quite qualifies. Vaclav Havel, and some Czechs I have run across over the years, are figures of as much gentleness as the world affords. Havel is praised often enough as a saint, but that sets the bar too high for us poor sinners. Praise him as a gentle man, a decent man, and see if we can follow suit.

Obama and Biden: Perfect Together?

Awakening this morning, I had the momentary suspicion that Obama's choice of Biden as his running mate had all been a dream. But no: unless I'm really bouncing around in a padded cell when I think I'm sitting at my laptop sipping coffee, this thing actually happened.

I know some very smart people believe that it was a very smart choice. I still don't see it. Despite a long Senate career, Biden has few legislative accomplishments, and has gotten attention mostly for how often he's put his foot in his mouth by runnng that mouth a little faster than the brain behind it permits. An outstanding quality of the man is that he thinks he's smarter than he actually is. Granted, that's probably true of every single one of us. But it's more conspicuous in certain people.

And maybe those reflections on Biden reveal why Obama chose him? Is it possible that Obama looked at Biden and liked what he saw simply because the two men are so much alike?

Consider: these are both nice guys, very likeable, but a bit narcissistic in the way that very likeable people often are. Both speak so fluently and enjoy their own voices so much that they tend to let their words run away with them. Both have had political careers in which those words have been far more notable than their accomplishments. Both like to think that they're operating outside the box when in fact they tend to toe the party line.

The two are even slightly similar physically: tall and rather slender, with long heads and big, ready smiles. Both have unusually expressive faces and talk a lot with their hands. It's easy to imagine the two in animated, agreeable conversation. Psychologists and careerists know all about the power of "personality mirroring" in making someone like you. But Biden might not have needed to make an effort to mirror Obama's personality. He just would have needed to be himself.

Admittedly, this is all speculative. Maybe Biden's foreign policy experience was the key to his selection. (If so, that's another sad comment on where the Democrats stand with respect to foreign policy.) Or maybe Biden seemed, to some, like a "regular Joe" who can balance Barack's somewhat exotic biography. Someday -- maybe someday soon -- we'll get the inside story.

For now, though, I can't help thinking that these two are awfully well matched. Once again -- this has been happening since 1992 with the exception of 2000 -- it seems to me that the Democrats have not so much balanced their ticket as reemphasized the front-runner's "brand."

Obama-Biden: An Idea Bomb?

Really? Really?

Well, I guess Obama and his minions know what they're doing. There must be some logic here that I don't quite see. Maybe Delaware is secret key to the electoral college arithmetic? Maybe Obama wants someone more prone than himself to make odd gaffelets?

Is it possible that Obama was just so flattered by Biden's remarks about him back in February? My heart always beats a little faster when someone calls me "articulate" and "clean"....

On Translation

Orwell notes (ca. 1943) the existence of English-language Indian literature, predicts it will disappear when the English leave. Bad call! Thoughts: how many Indians are now more familiar with English literature than Hindi literature? (To speak nothing of the Upanishads--if you speak Hindi, how much annotation do you need to read Sanskrit?) Do they forget their "own" culture?, as, I am told, the Turks were divorced from their old culture by the imposition of the Roman alphabet, as the Chinese or Japanese may be if they too adopt Roman script.

Should one engage in pre-emptive acts of translation, on the theory that one's own language may be forgotten one day? I think I have mentioned on this blog my general impression that more works have been translated into English than into any other language--but perhaps we should concentrate on translating English into French, Arabic, Chinese, Quechua, to make sure our words survive somehow. (I recollect that one of those Libertarianish institutes is translating Adam Smith into Arabic; imagine a future where Smith, as Aristotle, is reintroduced to the world in Arabic translation!) Perhaps we should create monumental tablets, laser-inscribed platinum, deposited around the world and on the moon, with (in small but legible script) the Oxford English Dictionary, English-X Dictionaries for some large number of X, and an updated Rosetta Stone--something short and eloquent, in English and a number of other languages. I nominate the Gettysburg Address; although perhaps "Ozymandias" would be more appropriate.

This, I think, should be done by an eccentric zillionaire of some sort.

On Orwell's Collected Essays--Five Hundred Pages In

His Marxism shackles his mind remarkably. No matter how intelligent and perceptive he is, he cannot stop thinking of the economic condition of writers; cannot stop thinking of workers' revolutions; cannot get class, violence, and crude politics out of his head. His rigidity progressively appalls. That he so confidently descants on the second-rateness of various works of Eliot, Yeats, Lawrence, etc., makes him seem a fool. I'm afraid that familiarity is steadily worsening my opinion of the man.

It almost makes you wonder if Christopher Hitchens should have looked for a different role-model.

P.S. "That he so confidently descants on the second-rateness of various works of Eliot, Yeats, Lawrence, etc., makes him seem a fool. " -- and you, Withywindle, who so confidently descants on the second-rateness of Orwell--what does that make you?

You'll Rue the Day, McCain!

I suppose I should begin this post by apologizing for my long absence from this blog. While I've been trying to bring order to my chaotic life, Withywindle has manfully (is that a sexist adverb?) been minding the shop alone. I've been meaning to reemerge for a while, and Barack Obama's latest odd remark is as good an occasion as any.

Now, I always thought Barack Obama had a way with language -- in fact, I praised his college poems on this very blog. But lately, he seems to have lost a sense for how his words are going to sound. A few days ago at Saddleback, there was the shockingly inept "above my pay grade" and the narrowly averted claim that Clarence Thomas was "not an experienced jurist." (Obama had the presence of mind to divert that locomotive onto a siding after the first syllable or two of the word "experienced," moments before the train ran him down.)

And now Obama apparently thought it was a good idea to say that "John McCain doesn't know what he's up against":

Oh, there's a charming soundbite from the front-runner. Because Americans hate underdogs, and they love guys who talk like movie villains. When conservatives say that Obama sometimes comes off as arrogant, it's not some racist code for how much they hate uppity black people: this is exactly the kind of thing they mean. Lots of folks in the flyover states like bravado, sure, but mainly in guys who have something to prove -- not presumptive nominees for the office of Maximum Leader. And when the bravado is tinged with mysterious menace (what is McCain up against? Ninjas? Demons? Orbital mind-control lasers? A softly ticking package from Bill Ayers? Massive amounts of special-interest cash and an almost unbelievably partisan media? Who knows?) the whole thing becomes just a little bit creepy.

On the other hand, maybe I'm wrong. What do I know? I'm not a senator, I've never organized a community bigger than a classroom, and I completely lack Obama's awesome power to command the seas. Maybe the honorable gentleman from Illinois understands something I don't. But if so, then why not crank the sinister rhetoric up a notch -- make people really take notice, y'know? In that spirit, then, and free of charge, here are some suggestions for applause lines at future Obama rallies:

• "John McCain does not yet know what I am capable of. But he will soon. Oh, yes. Yes. He will soon."



• "John McCain cannot defeat me. No man can defeat me. No woman can defeat me. No hermaphrodite can defeat me. No cyborg can defeat me. No Martian can defeat me. No libertarian can defeat me.... "



• "You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. McCain! And. You. Will. Atone!"


• "I am John McCain's worst nightmare. And keep in mind he probably still dreams about that North Vietnamese prison camp."


• "John McCain will know fear as never before. And despair. Fear and despair. Fear and despair and regret. Fear, despair, regret, and ennui. And thirst. And gout. And ingrown toenails. Indeed [sighs deeply] I think the ingrown toenails may be the worst of all."


• "Mwah hah hah hah hah! Mwah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah! Mwah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah!"

On Disentanglement From Foreign Alliances

(The persistent reader will note a foreign-policy jag in my posts lately. I haven't been doing research lately, I haven't been outraged by anything in academia lately, I don't have too much to say about domestic politics, save my little wasp-stings at Obama, my happy times with Goldberry and Shirebourn are not usually blog material, so that leaves foreign-policy--something I'm interested in, though I doubt all the readers of the blog are. Fear not, I can't blather on about it forever!)

The isolationists, right and left, are wrong to oppose the Iraq War. They lack a Bolshevist frame of mind, a sense that bad times lead to better ones. Do they dislike entangling alliances?--inertia will keep our armed forces abroad forever, in peace. The Iraq War has led us to draw down our garrisons in Europe and South Korea; some of those soldiers, I strongly suspect, will never return. The strain of war countervails inertia; the strain of war increases isolationist sentiment. A few more Iraq Wars, and America will have come home at last. And the body count?--oh, a necessary price to overcome inertia.

And the isolationist spirit? I think it is rising in America. It certainly is rising in me. When I look back at the sequence after 9-11, I think the most important thing was the deliberate obstruction of the Europeans (France and Germany) to our getting a UN resolution to authorize the Iraq War. It snapped my sense of the Europeans as friends; they became allies only; and that rending of sentiments has been irreparable. I favor aggressive prosecution of American interests abroad; I have some residual desire to fight to promote liberty abroad; but my affection for any foreigner has waned sharply, and my willingness to tie America to the defense of any foreigner has waned even more. Let the alliances end, say I--with all deliberate speed, but let them end.

Even Israel, toward which I feel particular affection, I would prefer to have cut off from our teat sooner or later. I don't want Israel destroyed, so that means crushing the genocidalists of the Muslim world first--Iran, however many others--but when the demolition job is done, it would be nice to get out of the Middle East. I would like Israel to be strong enough and secure enough not to need the American alliance.

The difficulty, of course, is in finding states to whom we can hand off responsibility for the world. Part of this difficulty is of our own making: a state strong enough to guarantee its own security is a state strong enough to oppose America. But I think by now America would welcome a Europe, a Japan, a South Korea, capable of their own defense, capable of garrisoning their corners of the world, strong enough that our troops could go home. Their willful incapacity helps keep us abroad--increases our contempt for them (mine, anyway), makes us more impatient to go. This situation isn't new--people have been saying much the same since, oh, 1945. But enough is enough. The American people, at any rate, I suspect emotionally checked out of the alliances in 1989 or 1991. The elites still care for them--but even that may be crumbling.

I've been talking in terms of NATO, military alliances--but of course there is the desire of the left to cede sovereignty to some sort of super-state, and the desire of the right to cede control of our economy to NAFTA and the WTO. Of these all, I suspect NAFTA and the WTO are for more unpopular than NATO and the International Court of Justice. It's worth noting that scuppering NATO may lead to scuppering the International Court of Justice and NAFTA as knock on effects. In a pinch, I'd take that bargain. Others may not agree, though. I do think one should consider the various isolationist sentiments as interrelated, and dynamic in their effects.

But the crucial dynamic is that we will not be a superpower indefinitely; slowly, but I think certainly, we are decaying into the ranks of a Great Power--the greatest of them all, perhaps, but not one capable of worldwide commitments. If we are becoming a nineteenth-century Great Britain, Splendid Isolation is in order--Navy, Si, Alliances, No. If we try to do too much, we will break.

And let us say at the end that I supported McCain in the Republican primary because foreign affairs trumps everything, even an open-borders policy that risks the dissolution of our nation. I would rather not be in the position that I have to make that choice. Ten years from now, twenty years from now, I want to be able to vote for a Tancredo without worrying about the security of the world. At any rate, I want to worry less--and I would like my political leaders to reorient American policy toward that happy goal, so we can get there on our own terms, rather than that of our enemies.

Spam e-mail title I just saw

"John McCain Chooses Osama Bin Laden As His Vice-President!"

Can you just imagine?

What if they chose two vice presidential candidates and nobody was excited?

On Dogmatism

I've started Orwell's Collected Essays. Much wonderful in them, of course--but I note that his tone of dogmatic certainty on every subject under the sun is more attractive in the Selected Essays, where, for some reason, fewer of his howling mistakes appear. ("England must have a socialist revolution within two years at the most, or it is doomed to be conquered by the Nazis." Ummm ...) Indeed, as the editor of the essays notes, there's more than a touch of the public-school boy in Orwell's writing, and Orwell sounds a great deal like the confident idiots he so mercilessly flays--just a Socialist idiot rather than a Conservative one. The dogmatic tone is alluring, but dangerous--something to remember as I blog about everything and sundry. Montaigne, perhaps, is still the perfect model--tentative, uncertain of everything, even of oneself.

More on Obama's Putative Islamic Upbringing

Some different issues here. One, how should one respond to pure slander, when done by your allies against your enemies? Peter Wehner provides a reasonable answer. I will grant, however, that I am human: strangely, slander of my enemies outrages my heart less than slander of my friends. Bad, Corsi! Bad! Give me your wrist so I can slap it.

But it is not just a question of slander--and consider the idea that "Barack Obama is Muslim" counts as a slander. Presumably, the left doesn't think There's Anything Wrong With Being A Muslim--is it technically slander to print something that is false but not injurious? If I were to print that McCain is an excellent pool player when he isn't, could he sue me?--but objects rather to the consequences of people believing that he is a Muslim. And indeed, there is an objection to saying what appears to be true--that Obama received some Islamic education--for fear that people will believe what is false--that Obama is a Muslim. Isn't this a bridge too far? Is there meant to be a legal injunction against saying True A for fear of belief in False B? Surely this cannot be sustained in law. Should there be an ethical imperative toward self-censorship? This amounts to urging a conspiracy of silence, because one does not trust millions of one's fellow citizens to analyze information properly. This is an evisceration of liberty and democracy.

But the very presuppositions of this line of objection are also false. Religious belief is not a political irrelevance. First, the practicality: it is not out of order to consider the possibility that Islamic faith, or upbringing, or familial ties, might make the President (or any public official) more reluctant to recognize Islamic enemies as enemies, and, by his slowness of recognition, do harm to the United States. Then the theory: one votes for character, one votes for identity, one votes to preserve political culture, and religion is not trivial to any of these three. Evangelicals prefer to vote for fellow evangelicals, and seculars prefer not to vote for evangelicals, for all three of these reasons--and one can multiply sympathies and antipathies. These are never illegitimate; they are part of the fabric of politics. To argue the irrelevance of faith is to attempt to short-circuit democratic politics; a candidate's faith is an issue to be addressed squarely, not swept under a rug.

Let us grant the narrow "Obama received several years of Islamic religious instruction," and no more. It is, in itself, a non-trivial fact--and the judgments and inferences to be drawn from this should be left to the people at large. Since Obama made his career in Chicago by a timely adoption of Christian faith; since his current attempt to appeal to the middle of America also rests in good part on his Christian faith; since he has parted from sheer fideism by his repudiation of Jeremiah Wright; since he has argued that what he learned in his childhood abroad has provided a part of his foreign-policy experience, and hence his qualification for the presidency; this fact of his early life is, and should be, also part of how he is judged fit for the presidency.

Now, McCain's Episcopal upbringing is not likely to have political ill-consequences, so this theory obviously benefits him. I will add, for even-handedness, that McCain's behavior to his first wife--his adulteries, his abandonment of her, his divorce--was grossly disgusting, and speaks very negatively to his character. I hold in contempt the idea that some spurious sense of privacy should shield him from full exposure of his sinful actions, or sanction a censoring shield to prevent every American from making a fully-informed judgment of his character.

Biased AP?

The AP is reportingon the Corsi hatchet-job on Obama, The Obama Nation. I read the article, and I think 1) Corsi is a noxious hatchet-man, whose book generally sounds vile; and 2) the AP is going to bat for Obama, recycling their counter-attacks, and not even admitting those few moments where Corsi is not entirely wrong. To wit:

The book is a compilation of all the innuendo and false rumors against Obama — that he was raised a Muslim, attended a radical, black church and secretly has a "black rage" hidden beneath the surface.

In fact, Obama is a Christian who attended Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

The careful reader will note that the facts that follow "in fact" in no way contradict the claims presented in the prior sentence. You can be raised Muslim and be a Christian; "radical, black church" is a fair description of Chez Jeremiah; and neither Christianity nor membership in Trinity is dispositive disproof that Obama harbors "black rage." On the same subject:

He claims Obama received extensive Islamic religious education as a boy in Indonesia, education that was only offered to the truly faithful. Actually, Obama is a Christian and as a boy he attended both Catholic school and Indonesian public schools where some basic study of the Koran was offered.

Again, you can be Christian and have attended Catholic school, and still have received extensive Islamic religious education. What this turns on is the extent of the "basic study of the Koran" offered in Indonesian public schools. Compared with an American public school, where religious study is Not On The Curriculum, "basic study" and "extensive" seem to be overlapping concepts. (The article, by the by, trades on an assumption that the Indonesian public school is comparable to the secular American public school, to minimize the importance of religious instruction within it. An unwarranted assumption.) At any rate, his attendance at such a public school would seem to undermine any direct refutation of Corsi's claims.

How can one read this purported piece of news analysis and not think the media is in the tank for Obama? Again: Corsi is doubtless vile in character, and slanderous in his writing--but this article descends to intellectual incoherence in its attempt to refute 100% of what he says, rather than just 99%.

You'd almost think that Obama spent a few years as a boy educated as a Muslim, and that his allies in the press are terrified that this basic truth will cost him the election.

On Idealistic Hawks (Neocons to the Vulgar)

The commentary about the Georgia crisis at The Weekly Standard and Commentary, and by John McCain, makes me as uneasy with this brand of conservatives as anything in the last two decades. Max Boot et al seem to be urging a bellicose response with little or no sense of our commitments elsewhere, and the moral support of Georgia seems not to take into account the possibility that 1) the Georgians were not born without sin; and 2) Saakashvili looks more and more like an intemperate fool with each passing day. "Georgia's ports and airports will be taken under the control of the U.S. Defense Department," says Saakashvili--this is either a fantasy, or something which you don't say out loud until it's happened.

I'm not a neocon. I prefer the Cheney/Rumsfeld model, aggressive pursuit of American interest, with an eye to our ideals, but not at the sacrifice of our interests. I think one ought to listen to the neocons, just as one ought to listen to libertarians, social conservatives, etc. At this moment, I would listen a bit less to the neocons, and I would note that their judgment here casts some doubt on their judgment in general.

European Strategy

We must assess precisely what we want to defend, and make sure we don't stumble into war with Russia. Our three priorities, in diminishing order, are 1) the defense of the ex-Warsaw Pact countries in Eastern Europe; 2) the defense of our NATO allies in the Baltic States; and 3) the preservation of Ukrainian independence from Russia, outside of NATO. If we are not prepared to go to war in defense of any of these objectives, this should be conveyed in unmistakable terms, at once, to all concerned. "Strategic ambiguity" is not our friend.

The tactical centerpiece of NATO defense in the Cold War was Germany; I believe the tactical centerpiece of NATO defense is now Poland. A sizeable Euro-American force needs to be based in Poland, 1) as a tripwire defense of Eastern Europe; 2) to deploy to the defense of the Baltic States; 3) to deploy to the Ukraine in some fashion, should it be attacked by Russia. This force should consist of one division apiece from America (redeployed from Germany), Britain, France, and Germany; 60,000 men in total, plus necessary support personnel. The European Union should invest in the East German, Polish, and Czech strategic arteries (road, rail, air) necessary to allow for secure, easy reinforcement of these forces from Western Europe. They should also invest in transport connections between Poland, the Baltic States, and the Ukraine, to allow for rapid deployment from Poland to the Baltic States and the Ukraine. The American Air Force in Europe should redeploy jointly to Poland and Romania. Any American forces in Germany not redeployed to Poland should be redeployed to the United States, or to bases elsewhere in the world.

We should not deploy more than a token tripwire of forces in the Baltic States, because 1) it would unnecessarily alarm the Russians; 2) there are so few Balts (under 10 million total, as I recollect), that a sizeable influx of Western soldiers would not only strain their economies but also, by dint of everyday friction between soldiers and civilians, quickly make them angry and suspicious of the West; and 3) our communication lines to the Baltic States are uncertain, whether by land through the bottleneck between the Russian Kaliningrad enclave and Belarus, or by sea across the Baltic, presumably infested by Russian submarines and subject to Russian air interdiction. Indeed, if we are going to commit to defend the Baltic States, we ought to make the adherence of Sweden to NATO a top priority. America and Europe--especially Europe--ought also to deploy a naval force to the Baltic Sea, tasked for the defense of the sea lanes to the Baltic States.

We should seek an agreement with Russia establishing Ukraine as a neutral buffer state. In a pinch, we should be prepared to sacrifice Ukraine to Russia--but we should try very hard to guarantee its independence, by all means short of war.

I do not believe the Western European militaries could even reach the Baltic States at this point, if they were attacked by Russia. This must be their new task: investment in their militaries, to allow them the independent capability of reacting to a Russian invasion of the Baltic States. This goal does not require the Europeans to reach American capabilities; it merely requires them to be able to match the Russian threat. America must also be involved in the defense of Eastern Europe, but Western Europe cannot be allowed to be a free-rider any longer. If Western Europe doesn't pony up the resources, it is time for us to go. In return, we will no longer ask the Europeans to take responsibility for any other part of the world, except the Mediterranean littoral.

Foreign Policy Commitments

America needs a strict prioritization of its interests. Again, we should not panic--but we cannot and should not face Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran alone. Our allies must step up and we must lessen our commitments. Even if our allies don't step up, we must lessen our commitments. Some thoughts:

1) There is a present danger from China and Russia in the realms of cyberwarfare and ground-to-orbit missiles aimed to knock out our satellites. Counter-terror, cyberwarfare, and satellite defense should receive equal priority.

2) Assume Russia and China are in the market for terrorist proxies; take countermeasures.

3) Time-limit our defense of South Korea. Either China cooperates in verifiably denuclearizing North Korea, or we give the go-ahead to South Korea to acquire nuclear weapons in South Korea. Our troops should be out of South Korea within ten years.

4) We cannot and should not match China's increase in military spending; that is Japan's job. Inform the Japanese that our security alliance is predicated on the Japanese spending 2% of their GDP on the military. Japanese commitments should focus on self-defense, defense of the Western Pacific sealanes, the defense of South Korea, and the defense of Taiwan, in that order. (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan also need to be informed that our separate guarantees of their security depend on their military cooperation for purposes of collective security in the future.)

5) Taiwan has almost certainly lost its chance to gain de jure independence, and a slow descent into the Chinese maw is probably inevitable at this point. Our defense of Taiwan should also therefore be time-limited: we will guarantee Taiwan against military conquest, but we will not protest as China's gentle persuasions convince the Taiwanese to accede voluntarily to unification. We should expect Taiwan to be reabsorbed into China within fifty years, and adjust our Chinese strategy accordingly.

6) The Middle East must remain an American priority, not only because of the nuclear/terror threats, but also because neither Europe nor Japan can project force into the Middle East. However, it ought not to absorb all our forces for the long term. We are almost certainly withdrawing a majority of our forces from Iraq in the next five years, whether in defeat or victory. Our relations with Iran will almost certainly reach a crisis point in the same time-frame--and should the Iranians be defeated, their declining oil revenues indicate they should be a declining factor thereafter. We should aim to have a maximum of two American divisions (commitment of six implied, with rotations) deployed in the Middle East thereafter.

7) Keep an eye on Venezuela; it's the most plausible threat to hemispheric security. Reserve sufficient forces to overthrow the Chavez regime, as needed.

8) The Russian threat requires a coordinated defense from Europe; America cannot and should not defend Eastern Europe without allies. More on this in a later blogpost. But England, France, and Germany must commit themselves economically and militarily to the defense of the East. If they do not, we should also withdraw our troops from Europe within twenty years.

9) The US Army currently consists of 10 divisions. This should increase to 13 within eight years and 16 within sixteen years.

10) My desire to have America prioritize its interests is not to discount America's great power, and deep resilience. If we have a better Act Two to the Russo-Georgian war--a successful defense of the Saakashvili regime, a resupply of Georgia--it will owe much to the quiet exertion of American power behind the scenes. The specific fact that we are too committed in Iraq to intervene in Georgia is also temporary: win or lose, the troops will be coming home from Iraq in the next few years, and be available for use elsewhere. Furthermore, the petrostates--Iran, Russia, Venezuela--will become much weaker when the price of oil finally does topple. So "prioritization" is not code for "scuttle"; our enemies still have great cause to fear us. Just because we can't do everything doesn't mean we're impotent. But, no, we can't do everything, and we need to be cold-eyed about what we should do first.

On the Morality of Betrayal

Let us note first that national interest is not amorality. National interest is to pursue the very great moral value of a common pooling of the interests of millions of separate individuals--to have each of these dedicate themselves to the interests of their fellows, to sacrifice oneself for the good of your fellows. It is not a saintly love for all mankind, but a particular love for your fellow citizens, and for your nation, your state. To follow national interest is to follow one ideal, not to sacrifice ideals.

This idealism must necessarily lead to nasty behavior to those outside your nation. Your nation's allies, your nation's friends--all, in a pinch, must be sacrificed for the nation to survive. National interest is a love brutal toward outsiders. And quite often it leads to cruel betrayals. Generally, large nations tend to use small ones as pawns to be sacrificed at need. (Consider how useful it is to have the Bear's nature exposed on a nation of no importance to us.) Perfidious Albion made peace with France in 1714 ... America was founded as a light on the hill toward other nations, but with no intention to provide material assistance to any of the nations (Kossuth's Hungarians, Garibaldi's Italians) whom it inspired. And whom have we betrayed recently? Poles left to Stalin after World War II; Hungarians inspired to rise in 1956; Hmong recruited to fight Vietnamese; Sh'ia in Iraq in 1991; now Georgians. Now, one can say that our true interests argued for a more aggressive policy in these various instances, and that is an interesting argument to make. But to say that we should fight for friends and allies when we have no interest in their survival whatsoever? That is a highly unpersuasive argument to make.

We should not pretend that we are not betraying our friends and allies when we do so; but neither should we shrink from such betrayals when necessary. Love of nation, love of our fellow citizens, demand such betrayals--and if we do not betray foreigners when necessary, we will betray our own fellow citizens, toward whom we have far greater obligations.

On the Definition of Europe

Isn't Georgia south of the ridge of the Caucasus, hence technically in Asia, not Europe?

But of course "Europe" is a question of civilizational definitions, with highly political, polemical intent. Whatever the definition is, Georgia is pretty damn marginal to any definition of Europe. What, since Jason brought back the Golden Fleece and Medea from Colchis, has Georgia provided the European heartland?

More on the Russo-Georgian War

The following is based on what I read as of 3 PM today, so it may already be out of date. It is also based on what a number of pundits have been saying--pardon the lack of links.

* I gather that what I am preaching--no American military intervention in Georgia--is the instant, bipartisan consensus of Bush, McCain, Obama, and the serried punditocracy. There are differences as to what other responses we might make, differences as to what general policies we might take, but there is, I think, general agreement that a direct confrontation with Russia is out of the question. So my earlier post is not original--thank heavens! I'm rather glad that what I'm preaching is conventional wisdom.

* Our dilemma underlines why we don't want Iran to have nuclear weapons. Imagine how much more we could support Georgia, absent Russian nukes. The fear of Russian nukes severely limits our options; we don't want to deal with Iran throwing its weight around in its own Near Abroad.

* We need an audit of what the American government was doing in the run-up to this invasion. What precisely did we say to the Georgian government? Did we in any way, shape, or form lead them to believe that they would have our support for an invasion of South Ossetia? If so, heads must roll. Our loose rhetoric--President Bush's loose rhetoric--also needs to be examined and condemned where necessary. We have given the impression that friendliness is equivalent to alliance, and this was a cruel deception. Also, did the CIA detect a Russian build-up of arms north of Georgia? If yes, did we warn the Georgians? If not, why not? Heads should roll here too.

* We should find out how much this war cost Russia, and how much of their armed forces were needed to conduct it. Did it cost $1 billion? I wouldn't be surprised. Has it used up all of Russia's deployable armed forces? Again, I wouldn't be surprised. But then, maybe Russia has grown more powerful in the last decade, and maybe this is a cheaper war than I thought. In either case, it is very important in determining our own policies to know to what extent this strains Russia's economic and military capacities. Can we bankrupt the Russians? Worth knowing.

* The administration knows, as no outsider can, exactly how much support we can give to Georgia without provoking a war with Russia. We are, for example, using American planes to transport Georgian troops back from Iraq; presumably we know we can get away with this. I would favor whatever support of Georgia we can get away with--but not at the risk of a hot war with Russia. As I say, this is difficult to backseat-drive from outside the government. The exact details have to be figured out by the appropriate policy officials.

* If Georgia survives this war with its independence intact, de facto and de jure, then, yes, we should continue to try to support it against the Russians. But both we and the Georgians should be aware that there is no alliance between us--and there should not be one. A NATO defense of Georgia is a bridge too far.

* The danger of allowing a Russian take-over of Georgia, de facto or de jure, is not so much the loss of Georgia itself, or Russia's re-asserted stranglehold on Central Asian energy pipelines, but that Russia will take this as license to intervene in similar fashion in Eastern Europe. Our interests do not require the defense of Georgia--but they do require a defense of our NATO allies, and they strongly favor the preservation of Ukrainian independence. What Russia does in Moldova, the Caucasus, and Central Asia does not threaten American interests--and may promote them, to the extent that it entangles Russia in war with various Islamic states and terrorists--but the defense of Europe, of Eastern Europe, most especially including the Baltic States, is in our interest. The expansion of NATO eastward thickened the defense of Western Europe, and weakened Russia, in ways that we must now allow to be revoked. The importance of Eastern Europe to American interests must be made clear to the Russians, now.

* Practically, we need a Euro-American tripwire in Eastern Europe, particularly in the Baltic States, which are most vulnerable to Russian aggression. This is delicate: the Russians obviously will go ballistic if NATO forces approach so closely to the Russian heartland. Yet the invasion of Georgia makes the presence of such a tripwire a necessity. Our current forces in Poland and Romania should be strengthened considerably--a move eastward from our German bases is even more in order. The Baltic States require an American garrison much like the garrison in South Korea--not strong enough to attack Russia, but strong enough to turn any Russian invasion of the Baltic States into an immediate casus belli. For political reasons, it would be a very good idea if Western European forces--British, French, German--also deployed into Eastern Europe, and especially the Baltics, as a symbol that Western Europe also considers its interests bound up in the defense of Eastern Europe. America cannot, and should not, bear the cost of opposition to Russia alone. Ideally, indeed, this should primarily be a European operation. America should provide essential stiffening, but not bear the major brunt of coin or men. The deployment of American and European forces into the Baltic States, Poland, and Romania is the cost Russia should pay for its invasion of Georgia.

* The Europeans should redeploy out of Afghanistan and Iraq and into Eastern Europe. There is no reason the Europeans should care more about Afghanistan than Estonia; refocus the Europeans, and NATO, on a European mission--one more within their capacities.

* Encourage the Europeans to seek energy security, non-Russian energy. Again, largely an internal European matter, but whatever we can do to facilitate, we should.

* Generally make sure that our rhetoric matches our commitments. I am very fond of Pres. Bush's rhetoric, but the downside in Georgia has been severe. America will inevitably betray its friends from time to time, as suits its interests, but there is no call to multiply instances needlessly.

* We shouldn't panic. Russia is still a brittle power, its economy in a shambles and its population dwindling by the day, dependent on a spike of oil prices for its ability to bully its neighbors. Iraq and Iran are greater short-term priorities, and China a greater long-term one. Russia, indeed, may be of use to us as an ally again in the fullness of time, and should not be needlessly irritated. A shift in our foreign policy is in order, not a revolution.

On the War in South Ossetia

We are busy in Iraq and we are not capable of going to war with Russia in support of Georgia. Georgian nationalism is not a cause worth fighting for; the integrity of sovereign Georgia against Russian militarism is worth protesting, but not the bones of a single Kentucky infantryman. There should be grave diplomatic consequences for Russia if it does not withdraw, perhaps economic ones, but that is that. I would even be careful about military resupply of Georgia. We should also calibrate our objections: a Russian occupation of South Ossetia is less objectionable than either a Russian advance into the rest of Georgia or a Russian annexation of South Ossetia. Our responses should be in Europe: organizing economic sanctions against Russia with Europe; increasing the supply of new gas lines, nuclear plants, etc., that will secure the energy independence of Europe from Russia; and--most importantly--moving more NATO forces into the Baltic States, Poland, and Romania, to emphasize that these are no longer in the Russian sphere of influence, even if Georgia is. If we can somehow trap the Russians into a debilitating occupation of some part of Georgia, the equivalent of their Chechen and Afghan horrorshows, then at least we can make lemonade from lemons.

This, at least, I have learned from our Iraq adventure: American power is limited. Spineless pacifism is not the correct policy for America, but we can't do everything, and we have to set priorities. The Muslim threat is a priority. Nuclear weapons are a priority. Iraq and Iran, therefore, are where America needs to focus its energies. We should maintain our commitments to defend Europe and Japan/South Korea/Taiwan--but to take up new ones? In the Russian sphere of influence? In a war between Christians, rather than on the frontier between Islam and the rest of the world? This isn't our battle. Let the Russians overextend themselves this time, not us. Send Stinger missiles, maybe, but that's it. A war of choice, as the lefties put it, can be the right thing to do--but more than one at a time is courting disaster.

Oh, and FLG keeps asking what NATO is for. The answer is: to keep Russia out of Norway, Finland, the Baltic States, Poland, and Romania, and to provide support for keeping Ukraine neutral. Russia is a lesser threat than the USSR was, and NATO is correspondingly less important, but it still serves a useful function. But interventions in Afghanistan need not be under the NATO umbrella.

The Myth of Decline

George Bernstein, The Myth of Decline, a survey of Postwar Britain, is rather good. The title tells it all: British decline was limited and inescapable, and in many ways Britain indeed never had it so good. Both Labor and the Conservatives did good things to make Britain better. Moaning is more fun for the Brits than cricket, but not really warranted. Engagingly written, persuasively argued. I'm more Thatcherite in my sympathies than is Bernstein, but he gives her due credit. Worth reading, worth assigning for class.

On The Passage Of Time

Teaching, you talk about the Rise of Germany Before World War One, or the Decline of Britain over any generation from 1880 onward. You skim over them so quickly in class, and--at least earlier--I didn't quite get the sense of how those slow changes felt, year by year. I begin to get that sense now. It's true what everyone says: your sense of politics and history changes as you get older. For me, my horizon of political memory goes back to 1980-1984--the 1970s really are a remarkably alien decade to me, politically speaking--and so in college, in the early 1990s, I had a very short political memory, and each change seemed Very Important. The longer I live, the more I get the sense of slow, gradual change, and of how drastic change builds upon a steady accumulation of small changes--how suddenly you wake up to find the world is changed. The great exceptions: the collapse of Communism in 1989-1991 did change the world, and 9-11 has half-changed the world. But for the rest: China Rises, the Islamic Threat Approaches, the Environmental Apocalypse Approaches (maybe!), and these are all stories I have been reading about for a quarter of a century now, living in day by day. And when the next cataclysmic change comes, then I'll be able to feel how slow change erupts into cataclysm. But in some ways, it's easier to imagine cataclysm than it is to imagine slow change. Age may be the best lesson for that.

Off For A Few Days II

Finished taking notes for my summer class! Oh, happy day!

On Dreyfus, Freud, and Jewish History

In my course, I have included readings on Dreyfus and Freud; excerpts from Isaac Bashevis Singer In My Father's Court next week. This is part of a Jewish theme for the course--one about which I feel ambivalent. How Much Is Just Right? How Much Is Too Much? Am I introducing my own bugaboos into the course. And then, for background on Freud, I did provide statistics--not provided in the textbook--on the exact extent of Jewish achievements in Germany and Prussia--banking success, banking success, professional success, intellectual success. This is, I think, crucial. How can you understand anti-Semitism without these numbers in mind? How can you understand Jewish pride in their achievements? How understand the context in any way? But I didn't quite know how to present this properly--I don't quite want to engage in the civics lessons, Don't Be Bad To Jews; I don't want to say Those Anti-Semites Had A Point, Look At All Them Jews; I want somehow to get a proper historical understanding that isn't special pleading or extenuation of hatred. Aaaand I provided the statistics, couldn't figure out how to say all this properly, and just left them lying there limply. Students didn't much say anything either. I shudder to think how this will all show up in the teaching evaluations. Egh, egh, egh.

Or, to coin a phrase, oy vey es mir.

Semi-Bah, Humbug

Got the comments on my book MS. Somewhat friendlier than the editor's summary--thought it might be worth publishing with some revision. So, the editors decided not to bother with that process. There are cogent critiques--not all of which I'm sure I can answer, not all of which I'm sure I want to answer. The book embodies a peculiar combination of personal limitations and interdisciplinary ambitions; a number of the reviewer's critiques, while they would make for a better book, might not make for the book I want to publish. There are some very interesting questions as to which audience I'm trying to address: much of what I argue is not news to one audience (the one catered to by this university press, as it turns out), though I think it is news to other disciplines. But of course their university presses find this so strange, they don't seem to want to touch it! Oh, and of course I'm lazy and hate the thought of revision. I'm considering whether to cannibalize the various unpublished chapters, to submit as articles. There might be benefits to this course of action--and costs, of course.

What I'm trying to convey here is that while I want to think of myself as a Misunderstood, Frustrated Genius, I could always be wrong about that.

On Regionalism and Vice Presidents

There was a time, in the early 2000s, when the dominant figures in the Republican party were Bush (Texas), Armey (Texas),Lott (Mississippi), and the face of Republicanism recently had been Gingrich (Georgia). This was an extraordinary concentration of political leadership in the Deep South. Even the later shift to Frist (Tennessee) left the face of the party Southern, if not entirely Deep Southern. (I ignore Hastert (Illinois) as an obvious figurehead. And Cheney (Wyoming) had actually been resident in Texas for much of the 1990s.) This reflected the shift of the Republican heart to the South--and the overlapping shift to deep conservatism--but it also concentrated too much power in the hands of one region. Ideology is all well and good to explain politics, but American politics is also an alliance of states, regions, and the overconcentration of power in the Deep South I think turned people off simply on regional grounds.

Hence I think it is healthy that the top Republican figures are now McCain (Arizona), Bohner (Ohio), and McConnell (Kentucky)--they send the message that Southern dominance is over. But it makes the choice of Vice President interesting. Do you reassure the Southern heartland of the GOP that they have a place in the coalition?--Sanford, Jindal, Cantor. Or are voters outside of the South allergic to any Republican with a drawl?--Pawlenty, Romney, Portman, Kasich. I hope McCain includes some such regional calculation in his decision.

Bah, Humbug

Another university press rejected my World-Changing Synthesis. This time, with only three sentences summarizing the outside reviewers comments, rather than the actual comments--this makes it hard to do an effective revision. I've sent in a polite request for said comment. However, this means there's no chance the book could be accepted before interview decisions are made this fall. Bah, humbug.

Anthony, Conclusion

Konstantinovka, a settlemet on the lower Don River, might have contained a resident group of Maikop people, and there were kurgan graves with Maikop artifacts around the settlement (figure 12.12). About 90% of the settlements ceramics were a local Don-steppe shell-termpereed, cord-impressed type connected with the cultures of the Dnieper-Donets steppes to the west (late Sredni Stog, according to Telgin). ....

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I skimmed over the bulk of this book at great speed--the brilliant summary of linguistics bogged down into archaeological detail and Russian place names. So: detailed exposition of archaeological remains, plausible interpretation of the living cultures implied by the artifacts, and then the also plausible, but obviously more conjectural, association of these archaeological remains with various Indo-European origins and migrations. Some rather nifty bits on how you can use the wear on horse-tooth-remains to tell whether the horses had bits in their mouths, and therefore were domesticated. The take-away?

* Archaeology now allows a remarkably good window into the history of the Balkans and the Eurasian steppes from 6000BC onward. I now have a much better sense of what was happening north of Uruk and Jericho.

* Interesting exploration of how the introduction of crops, cattle, horses, wagons, and chariots each affect the way of life in the Balkans and the steppes.

* Also interesting to see how the center of gravity of innovation among the Proto Indo Europeans shifts from west to east--that is, agriculture and cattle come from agriculturalists on the Carpathians; the wagon comes up from Mesopotamia and the Caucasus; and the chariot is developed east of the Urals, in association with a Central Asian culture linking the steppes to Iran and India. These Siberian charioteers will be the Indo-Iranians who sweep down to conquer everything from Susa to the Ganges.

* Anthony assumes a plausible dynamic--that a few Indo-European elites spread out from the steppes, enter into patron-client relations with whomever, and the language spreads dynamically among their clients, their clients' clients, etc. (He emphasizes that the Indo-Europeans, from the evidence of the Rig Veda, defined themselves by language and ritual observance, not by ancestry.) This indeed parallels what I know of the German migrations into the Roman Empire and the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England. But if plausible, it's also rather difficult to disprove. What does one think about plausible, unverifiable theories?

* There's also a number of links missing. He shows where he thinks the Celts, Germans, and Italics leave the steppes--but can't follow their history thereafter. OK, another book can deal with this, but it's worth noting that his narrative gets very hazy once he leaves the steppes.

So, a book more worth skimming than reading after the first hundred pages. It is intelligent, and well-argued. I suppose by the nature of the subject, reasonable doubt remains, and a new archaeological dig could upend the historical narrative. I'm willing to accept it for now--but be cautious about proselytizing it.

PS. H. Beam Piper has an alternate-history book, Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, involving the Aryan-Transpacific timeline. Oh, how I wish there had been an Aryan-Transpacific migration! Imagine the joy of the linguists!

Aleksandr Solzhenitysn Dead

According to the latest news report. A great man and a great historian. He wrote The Gulag Archipelago largely by assembling oral histories of prisoners, at a time when the Soviet regime allowed no real historical research to be conducted into its crimes; his history is confirmed in all essentials, and most details, by Anne Applebaum's Gulag. One of the great feats of historical writing of all time.

I haven't read his later works, which have been accused of Russian nationalism, anti-Semitism, etc. They may well be so; but Ivan Denisovich and Gulag Archipelago are triumphs of a humane vision.

On Teaching the Nature of History

I want to teach students to examine the way history is written, and I continue to fail. They don't think in terms of different points of view, different arguments, historians in conversation with one another; they think in terms of bias, objective truth, and fact. Fact, not argument, the besetting sin of the modern age. Nor do they think of history in terms of moral pedagogy--or if they do, they don't see how you can be faithful to the detailed fabric of history and still write with meaning for the present day. And I don't quite know how to teach this either, at least to students in Large, Mediocre Universities. Now, there are some obvious things I should do--have multiple readings on one subject, expressing different points of view. I resist this because you end up with too-short snippets of the different arguments--but perhaps I resist wrongly. Ultimately, of course, I want the traditional curriculum, where you learn to read history as argument and moral pedagogy from elementary school. But failing that, I need a better remedial technique.

Professional History

Hajo Holborn's article on Moltke in The Makers of Modern Strategy describes how Moltke made the study of military history central to the professional formation of the serving officer, and also (I push beyond Holborn here), helped invent the modern study of military history. (I know true of the modern American military; I wonder if it's truly global in scope by now?) History, rhetoric, prudence, all wonderfully aligned for my own bugaboos. I wonder, however, how many professions integrate historical study into their professional ethic, and thereby align their professions with rhetorical thought? Theology and the law clearly have long-standing affiliations with history--who, I wonder, is the equivalent of Moltke in each profession that initiates the modern, professional study of theological and legal history? I don't have a sense that doctors, scientists, engineers, etc., have the study of their history at the core of their professional identities. Am I wrong?

I believe that at least since World War II, the US military has fought wars with official military historians grabbing papers from the get-go, preparing to write a military history. Which army in which war did that first, I wonder?

More Antony

The heart of his book does indeed involve a rather meaty discussion of archaeology, where "meaty" means "dry, My Eyes Glaze Over." So, yes, we determine that an ancient tribe has switched from foraging to cattle-raising by counting the number of sheep-bone-fragments in their middens. Also, if human bones have a lot of nitrogen, that means they're still eating a lot of fish. I eagerly await the conclusion, but obviously the critique "this culture you describe in loving detail can't be proven to be Proto-Indo-European-speaking" is unanswerable--it's an argument built on circumstantial evidence and elegant logical inference. Not therefore valueless, but one does need to remember its nature.

But a niftiness: "Foragers generally value immediate sharing and generosity over miserly saving for the future, so the shift to keeping breeding stock was a moral as well as an economic one. It probably offended the old morals. It is not surprising that it was resisted." [p. 155]

Despite my conservative leanings, I too easily think of the acquisition of technology in prehistory--in history--as a matter of aptitude, intelligence, etc.; it's a very valuable reminder to think of it as a moral question, where late-adapters are not slow, but possess a positive moral attachment to the old. Worth keeping in mind with relation to all sorts of historical questions, and present-day political issues.

Predictive Linguistics

I've finally started reading David Anthony's The Horse, The Wheel, and Language, about the origins of the Indo-Europeans--I mentioned a while ago a bit about horses, retailed second-hand from my dad while he was reading it. The first 100 pages are wonderful--introductions to how historical linguistics, archaeology, and migration studies work; and a clear exposition of his own thesis that gives you enough information of opposing theories to have a fair sense of where he departs from scholarly consensus. I.e., Anthony argues that while it may be true that pots aren't people (material remains don't reliably indicate an ethne), sometimes pots are languages (persistent frontiers, saith he). He starts with the linguistics--he's an archaeologist by training, and I think the archaeology is the upcoming meat of the book--and he cites a wonderful example of the power of linguistics--predictive linguistics.

For example, the oldest recorded Germanic cognates for the word guest (Gothic gasts, Old Norse gestr, Old High German gast) are thought to be derived from a reconstructed late Proto-Indo-European *ghos-ti- (which probably meant both "host" and "guest" and thus referred to a relationship of hospitality between strangers rather than to one of its roles) through a Proto-Germanic form reconstructed as *gastiz. None of the known forms of the word in the later Germanic languages contained the i before the final consonant, but rules of sound change predicted that the i should theoretically have been there in Proto-Germanic. Then an archaic Germanic inscription was found on a gold horn dug from a grave in Denmark. The inscription of ek hlewagastiz holitijaz (or holtingaz) horna ta-wido is translated "I, Hlewagasti of Holt (or Holting) made the horn." It contained the personal name Hlewagastiz, made up of two stems, Hlewa- "fame" and gastiz "guest". Linguists were excited not because the horn was a beautiful golden artifact but because the stem contained the predicted i, verifying the accuracy of both the reconstructed Proto-Germanic form and its late Proto-Indo-European ancestor. Linguistic reconstruction had passed a real-world test. [pp. 31-32]

This is marvelous. One of those times you get an insight into how a whole strange discipline works, its power and its beauty.

On Judgments of Incompetence

Various commentators, conservative and liberal, have been accusing the McCain campaign of incompetence of late. I am skeptical of such accusations--they often have a polemical purpose behind them, as in the drumbeat of accusations against the Bush administration over the past seven years, hurled immediately at any action, in hopes that a calumny will stick. So, some things to note while judging incompetence.

* McCain won the nomination essentially broke, with no money and no staff. He's had to spend a good deal of his time since then fundraising and building up his organization. So, presumably, has the skeleton crew that staffed his campaign to victory. This leaves them all less time to do anything--or even, I suspect, to think up a coherent strategy. Some "incompetence" can be chalked up to busyness and poverty.

(Note to self: supporting a broke candidate with a sketchy relationship with the party moneymen has consequences. Still the right choice to make, I think, but the consequences matter.)

* McCain has to finesse a chasm between a conservative base and a moderate middle that loathes all the policies the conservative base loves. What this needs is not so much competence as genius--and one shouldn't be too bitter at a campaign that merely lacks genius.

* McCain's not trailing badly in the polls--maybe even tied says Gallup--by dint of scrappy counter-punching, and letting Obama hang himself with his own self-love and platitudes. So maybe there is something to the strategy the campaign has used so far. It may not be brilliant, but it's not a miserable failure, so far as I can tell.

* But, yes, they do need a positive, overarching theme, and someone needs to sit on McCain until he can stay on topic for a week straight and deliver a decent speech. These are failings--serious ones, conceivably crucial ones, and certainly dangerous ones for a campaign that cannot afford to make any mistakes. But to say "incompetent" is to put it too strongly.

I could not make this up

Pakistani intelligence helped blow up the Indian embassy in Kabul, noteworthy in itself, but notice this:

But the British officer, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, said the program had been temporarily delayed. “We don’t yet have a firm start date,” he told a small group of reporters. “We’re ready to go.”

Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup. Savor this. It is the best British military name since General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett.